Your website is really there for a reason –the raison d’etre might be selling products as an e-commerce. selling professional services by generating leads, or otherwise for a home base blogger , the website shares wonderful knowledge and experience. Be it one or the other- you have a chance for growth and using your website to the fullest can reveal hidden opportunities you never saw were there. Knowledge about – your website-, business goals, your potential customers, audience or your competitors is really knowledge of your business from all possible angles. It’s a 360 degree view that can generate a goldmine of insights and trigger new spikes in sales.

The market offers a range of tools, particularly designed to analyze data in each of these four areas. Some are highly sophisticated, expensive, complicated to implement while the others are free but at the same time not effective enough. Neither of these do really meet needs of our highly conscience, value seeking, and budding business class audience and therefore have no place in this post. We are really talking about best of both worlds. Robust, feature rich, smart tools available at zero to little cost.

About Your Website-This bare basic information about your website. It talks about your website but it’s also important for other analysis .What are the most popular pages, and which ones have the highest exits/bounces. What turns your visitor off and never gets him engaged to what appeals to him . How many new visitors to your website and what portion of that traffic leaves from landing page. Some free tools offering this information are – Google Analytics, Yahoo-web analytics, Xiti, Piwik, AWStats etc.

About the Business Goals your Website Achieve– Your website is important because it is tied to your business- 100%. It inherits your business plans, targets and goals . Like your real business, it’s critical you measure rate of success for your website too. Most of the clickstream tools can also measure multiple goals, goal sets and extent of success in each. So namely these are Google Analytics, Yahoo-web analytics, Feedburner, 4Q by iPerceptions

About your Audience and Potential Customers– Reading the minds of customer is one the most daunting tasks ever known to marketers. Many god send great marketers, were believed to have that uncanny power, but what about others? Do they get washed down, No. they have customers walk up to them and disclose all that they like or prefer. Yes that’s possible! Website experimentation, A/B split test, Multivariate test quantify the voice of customers. Some great tools are Optimizely, Google Content Experimentation, SiteSpect, Forsee etc.

About Your Competitors– Sitting in the driver’s seat with the window panes painted black, you will know little about the surround. Remove the opaque coat and d now see- you might find yourself ahead of others, that’s great, but you might as well be lagging miles behind the rest . Think of it and most of your strategic decisions are guided by the competition – ones you want to overthrow or avoid. And high chance your website is also competing against the same set of competitors in the cyber space. Know about clicks, keywords, value of customer engagements , relative to your competition. Google Display Planner, Google Trend , Compete, HitWise etc.

In our last article we tried typical pain points, queries and confusions of business owners who are unable to use the data readily available for their website. The above list is our solution. Try them out at minimum risk and experience the power of an all rounded information about your business and put them in action.

Look forward to my next post for a detailed pros – cons Analysis and comparison of each tool with others in the category.